Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 940

Chapter 940: Guild Leader Privileges

"Was. Guild leader privileges."

"You don’t know where anything is."

"I have the card. The card has diagrams."

She sat there, red-eyed and clutching the counter’s edge, and watched the Paragon of Sin squint at her batter instructions like an ancient text.

He measured the flour twice. He cracked the first egg competently and the second one vengefully, and picked shell out of the bowl while pretending she couldn’t see him do it. When he poured the batter, he poured with conviction, and the fill line could file a complaint.

The iron hissed in protest. Batter breached the edges and dripped onto the counter in slow, doomed ribbons.

"You drowned it," Alice whispered.

"I committed to a generous pour."

"The line exists, big brother. Agatha’s cooks get expelled for less."

"I’m her boss. Let’s see her try expelling me."

"That doesn’t mean you can make mistakes... The card says level, big brother. Level. Revision twelve exists because of the fill line..."

The first waffle emerged as two nations, one pale and undercooked, the other char-adjacent, joined by a border of perfect golden brown approximately a centimeter wide. Kaiden held it up.

Alice clapped a hand over her mouth. What escaped around it was a giggle, small and wet and completely unguarded, then another one. Then she was laughing properly, hiccups and all, pointing at the disaster in his hand with tears still drying on her cheeks.

She watched him fumble her sacred craft with zero tribunal in her, delighted, glowing, at five in the morning, over burnt batter, because it was him holding it.

"The second one will be better," he informed her.

"The second one can only be better, big brother."

"...What a tough customer."

"Hehe!"

The second one was better. Honest-to-goodness edible, even, and he plated it under her direction, sift the sugar, no, sift it, that’s dumping, and set it in front of her with a flourish.

Alice looked at the waffle. Then she slid off the stool, retrieved her clipboard from the tile, wiped it on her pajama sleeve, and wrote something with great ceremony before turning it around for him to see.

A minus, crossed out. A plus written next to it.

"For heart," she said.

They ate side by side on the stools, shoulders touching, working through one catastrophic waffle and one acceptable one while the palace stayed dark and unhurried around them and the hour crept toward the first alarm going off somewhere down the corridor. Alice’s head found his arm and stayed there, and the sniffles spaced themselves out until they were only punctuation.

"Verdict?" he asked.

She chewed, considered, and delivered it with her eyes closed and her cheek against his shoulder.

"The worst waffle ever produced at this station." A pause. "But the best I ever had..."

Later, between bites, Alice’s eyes went distant for a moment, fixed on the empty air where the report lived, and her fingers made one decisive flick through it. "Archived," she reported to nobody in particular, brisk and final, shelving it somewhere between the expired coupons and the warranty notices. Filed under things that technically existed and nobody needed.

Overhead, the pipes announced the first shower of the morning.

Neither of them moved to hurry. They sat shoulder to shoulder and split the last acceptable waffle between them while the first one cooled at the end of the counter as a monument.

"They’re going to come down," she said.

"They are."

"And then it stops being ours."

Kaiden looked at her, puffy-eyed and sugar-dusted, guarding the last quiet minute of the morning like a dragon on a very small hoard, and reached over to tuck a white strand of hair behind her ear.

"Then we don’t tell them," he said. "I need less sleep these days, and if I work them hard in the evening, we should have a few hours like this every once in a while." He tipped his head down to look at her. "Family secret?"

Alice’s whole face lit from the inside. "Family secret," she repeated, solemn as a vow, and if some of the shine in her eyes was fresh, neither of them mentioned that either.

Luna arrived first, barefoot, mid-yawn, hair unbrushed, moving just gingerly enough that anyone who commented on it would die. She made it two steps into the kitchen before her brain processed the scene and rejected it.

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